Reading a book whose beginning is missing

Open scan 5, labelled 3r in the manuscript sequence. It does not introduce an author or announce a finished system. The first lines continue an address to named spirits and ask for a knowledgeable teacher. This abrupt entrance is a material fact: the library records that leaves 1 and 2 are missing. A leaf has two sides, so the absent beginning is not simply two missing screen images. The present viewer also includes binding and preliminary images before the first surviving numbered leaf. Reading begins by keeping these three counts separate: the original leaf, its front or back, and the modern scan.

OCCULT HALL · INTERPRETIVE ILLUSTRATION

The page repeatedly places an 'I' opposite an addressed 'you'. That grammatical arrangement makes the writing resemble speech, but it does not identify the historical copyist as a person who performed every action described. A manuscript can preserve instructions copied from another manuscript. Its speaker may be a role supplied for an imagined future operator. The request for a spirit in a master's form gives that role a particular desire: learning without fear. We can reconstruct the relationship that the wording proposes while leaving open who copied it, who read it aloud, and whether anyone claimed to obtain its promised result.

The library calls the object Liber incantationum, exorcismorum et fascinationum variarum, a book of varied incantations, exorcisms, and enchantments. 'Munich Manual of Necromancy' is a useful modern name for studying it. Neither label restores the lost opening or supplies an author's signature. Its shelfmark, Clm 849, identifies the physical volume within the collection. These different names do different work. The Latin catalogue description tells us what kind of material is present; the modern name makes the volume memorable; the shelfmark permits a precise reference. Treating them as interchangeable would turn a library description into an unsupported claim about original authorship.

Now compare scan 316, f.156v, with the opening page. The later page has a visibly different hand and German wording, while the first passage is Latin. This comparison is sufficient to show why the whole surviving codex deserves to remain available beside selected lessons. It does not establish the exact number of compilers, their dates, or their intentions. A change of language is evidence of textual variety, not automatically a new owner. Likewise, a different handwriting can indicate another copying activity without proving a separate tradition. The safest observation is concrete: these pages present different written voices within one preserved object.

Open the book

01

Folio 3r — the surviving opening

The passage begins in the middle of an address, with named spirits and a request for a teacher.

Open the book

02

Folio 156v — a different written voice

Compare the German wording and handwriting with the Latin opening; the full codex preserves both.

The first page asks for an expert, kindly and faithful teacher who appears in a recognizable form. Those are conditions of an imagined successful encounter. They are not a report of a completed experiment, a modern test, or an explanation of how knowledge was independently checked. This distinction will guide the entire course. A banquet, a vessel vision, or a flying chair can be studied closely as a claim with a structure: someone desires something, addresses an authority, and specifies a result. Historical reading becomes richer when we examine those details rather than converting the manuscript's confident future tense into our own certainty.